Maximum Ride and the Catastrophe of Time
by Mecha Springs
Summary: For the hundredth time, the School has meddled with something beyond their control. Max, Fang, Iggy, and Nudge are sent thirty years into the past to a war-torn Hogwarts. Not even Angel could predict what would happen next...
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This is post-STWAOES but pre-TFW (because, in my opinion, both TFW and Max sucked. Horribly. But that's a rant for another day.) The following chapters will be longer, I promise; this is more like a prologue than an actual chapter. Rated T because Max can swear like a sailor.

They always found us. Always.

It never mattered where we were, or how well we blended in. They always knew, somehow, and – though I had several nagging suspicions that the "somehow" had to do with a certain backstabbing cretin who liked to call himself my father – I didn't know how. Sometimes I wondered if I even cared anymore.

And so, like last time, and the time before that, and every single freaking time before that, we ran.

We had been at Dr. Martinez's – Mom's – house when it happened. We were eating dinner, as a matter of fact, green bean casserole and grilled chicken and home-made biscuits. If someone was looking through our window, heck, we might have even passed as normal! Just seven kids, two dogs, one woman, and a mountain of delicious food. Perfectly inconspicuous… right?

That was when the gunfire started.

_Bang, bang, bang_. Three shots shattered the window behind Angel and Gazzy. Glass rained down on them, and they both dived in either direction, their wings snapping out in a flurry of feathers. I shoved my chair out of the way and sprung to my feet, my arms automatically reaching out and shoving Dr. Martinez behind me.

"Iggy – " I started, only to see that he had grabbed Ella protectively and had forced her back as I had done to Dr. Martinez.

More gunfire, this time uncountable, not that I took the time to pause to attempt to count it. I didn't take the time to think – I just did. Like every other fight I'd been in, I set my body on autopilot, my brain focused on only one thing: escape.

It's funny how the words "every other fight I'd been in" seemed to fit together so perfectly in a sentence about my life. Just once, for one tiny little fraction of a second, I wished I was normal. You know, a roof over my head and food on my table and no psycho wackjobs out to take over the world and kill me and my family. But, no, that would simply be too much to ask! One day I'd have to get that silly imagination of mine in check.

We ran into the living room in a pseudo-formation, a clump of wings and fists surrounding Dr. Martinez and Ella. Suddenly, they seemed all-too-breakable, too vulnerable… too losable. The gunfire was coming from two sides now, advancing behind us in a hailstorm of cracking glass and pounding determinedly at the chimney to our left. Already I could see the fragile bricks chipping and cracking. They were trying to drive us out, herding us like mice through a maze. The bullets weren't aimed to kill, just to scare, or maybe maim. They wanted us alive.

I glanced at Fang next to me as another round of bullets hit the chimney. The Flock instinctively pressed inward, further shielding Dr. Martinez and Ella in a layer of bodies.

"U and A," he mouthed silently at me, and I nodded. It wasn't going to be easy, even if we managed to make it to the porch and the sanctuary of the blue sky above. If they had guns meant to injure, then they surely had tranquilizers meant to disable… and then there was the problem of the extra weight. None of us had ever flown for any great length of time toting a body, and we would have to get to high altitude as quickly as possible if we wanted to survive.

Leaving my mother and half-sister behind was not an option.

Like a single entity, a waving amoeba of people and mutants, we shuffled to the front of the house. The gunfire paused: they could hear us moving.

"Fang… Iggy… you've got Dr. Martinez," I whispered as loudly as I dared. "Nudge, we're taking Ella. Angel, Gazzy…"

I took a deep breath. They weren't going to like this part, but I wasn't going to let them argue about it. They knew we didn't have any more time. "Get out of the way as fast as you can. If we get caught, it's not going to be any use to anyone if you get caught, too. Just go."

It was a testament to the seriousness of the situation that they didn't fight it; they simply nodded mutely as we continued to draw closer to the door.

I drew in a controlled, deep breath. "One…. Two…"

Gazzy ran forward and kicked the door open. "THREE!"

He seized Angel's arm and catapulted himself into the air, his wings catching a lucky updraft with a _whoosh!_ In the split-second in which Iggy and Fang linked arms with Dr. Martinez and took off in turn, my ears prickled, listening for the gun-toting bad guys' reactions. There was silence. We had caught them by surprise. That was good. Maybe – just maybe – we had a chance.

In almost complete unison, Nudge and I interlocked our elbows with Ella's and took one, two, three long strides forwards. I could feel the tension in Ella's body as I bent my knees and sprung off the ground. She was just as terrified as we were.

My wings alighted on the air just as the ear-piercing clatter of shots hit the sky once again. I forced my wings to beat in a forceful, rhythmic pattern – up, down, up, down, up, down – surging upward at a slowly but steadily ascending pace.

Bullets whizzed past my head, making my hair flutter in the breeze and my heart stutter… but nothing touched me.

_C'mon, Max… c'mon… just a bit higher…_

We were rising, higher and higher, almost out of range. We were going to make –

Something hit me in the back of the neck, and a starburst of pain exploded at the top of my spinal cord. I dropped like a rock, my body tumbling forward. The earth rose in front of my eyes, drawing nearer at a fatal pace.

I blacked out.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Thank you so much for the views and reviews! Loves to all! On a random side note, does anyone else really, really, really love Hanschen from _Spring Awakening_? His part in _The B*tch of Living_ makes me giggle every time. Bobby Maler, he's the best. :)

It was colder here.

This was the first thing that I noticed as I came to, head throbbing and neck twinging, on an icy stone floor. Groggily, I pushed myself into a sitting position and rubbed my eyes. My wings tucked impulsively back into the slits in the back of my sweatshirt as I took in my surroundings; I was in an unfamiliar place, somewhere far away from the cold, white lights and sterile environment of the School, or the metallic business structure of Itex. Here, the walls were chilling and made of stone, shrouded in tapestries and large, arcing windows and paintings that were –

Oh, God.

They were moving.

Whatever it was that the jerks from the School had hit me with, it was _strong_. I forced myself up, wobbling with dizziness, and watched a group of knights in a pasture joust with gleaming metal swords. From a few feet away, I could hear the clanking of iron-on-iron, and the jeers of the fighting men.

Automatically, though I was far too nauseous and hallucinatory to create any masterful plans of escape, I scanned the area for exits. To my right was a stairway that was in the process of rotating – _rotating!_ – clockwise to connect to a landing below, while to my left was a window that looked about twice my height. The glass looked thin and easily breakable, but, from the number of stairways I could see below, I wasn't sure my disoriented wings would snap out in time to stop my fall.

I turned to ask Fang, the one person I could count on to have a plan, or at least a gut instinct, for advice… but he was gone. My heart leaped into my throat, and I whirled around. I did a rapid three-sixty, my eyes scanning the hallway from top to bottom and even down the stairways. It was logical for the whitecoats to have separated and sedated us, even to have dosed us with some sort of untested and highly dangerous hallucinogen, but they would never have left me to wander on my own. I – and I prided myself in saying so – was too dangerous for that.

"Fang?" I called out tentatively. "Iggy? Nudge?" No response. "Gazzy? Angel?"

Nothing. The knights in the painting had stopped jousting and were turned quizzically towards me; though they didn't say anything, the identical glaring stare seemed to scream at me, "What's _her_ problem?"

_That she's too stupid and selfish to do anything right for once_, I answered internally. This was all my fault, and I knew it. I had known how risky it was to stay with Ella and Dr. Martinez; Jeb knew where their house was, knew all of its flaws and all of its defenses. I put them in danger every moment I stayed. Now… it was too late. They were gone, and I was the only one to blame.

How could I have been so stupid? I spun around to face the stone wall and kicked it with all of my might. (Which, I must say, is quite a lot of might.)

Big mistake. My big toe throbbed, and I hopped tipsily backward. "Ow! Frickity frick fri – OW!"

"You're on the wrong side of the school. The 'Punchable Passage' is in the North Wing. But I'll give you an 'O' for Effort, anyway. That looked like it hurt."

I set my foot down with a painful thud and flipped to face the newcomer – or, as I then saw, newcomer_s_ – with balled fists. The one who had spoken, with an aloof British accent, had a head of sleek black hair and the kind of haughty, superior black eyes that years at the School had taught me to mistrust. He was wearing what looked like a plain bathrobe, sans belt, with a red and gold emblem embroidered in the top corner. Two boys in the same black robes flanked him, one shorter with straw-colored hair and blue eyes that reminded me painfully of Ari's and the other taller with darker tresses and round glasses. If I had to guess, I would put them around my age (or, at least, my assumed age).

"Where the hell –" I started, but the adrenaline spike of my fighting stance drained out of me as quickly as it had appeared. My head spun and I stumbled backwards.

The two black-haired boys leapt forward, their arms out to steady my uneasy movements. I flinched away almost involuntarily from their touch.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, it's okay!" said the one with the glasses, raising his hands in the universal gesture of surrender, a gesture that I happened to like a lot. His tone was kind and gentle, not as elegant and unnerving as the first boy's, and I relaxed my body a fraction of an inch. "We just wanna help you. You look sick. Do you need to get to the Infirmary? We can take you, we were already heading that way."

"What's the Infirmary?" I asked quizzically, my eyes narrowing as they darted from boy to boy. "Where're my Fl – my friends?"

"What's the Infirmary?" the third boy asked, and though his voice cracked pubescently, it wasn't mocking, and it was just as gentle as the boy with the glasses. "Blimey, did you hit your head? James, we should get her to Pomfrey."

"_Where are my friends?_" I repeated insistently, distinctly aware of the way the blonde boy had dodged the question. I shook my head viciously to clear it of the spots that had erupted in front of my eyes. I pushed the glasses boy away from me roughly. "I don't know what you've done to them, but you're going to take me to them."

"What house are you in? We can take you back, after we take you to the Infirmary." When I started to protest, he cut me off, adding, "I know, I know – you're disoriented. You must've tripped and hurt your head or something, but don't worry, Pomfrey can fix that in a second. I'm James, okay? James Potter. We're here to help."

He linked his arm in mine for support, and the other black-haired boy came to stand on my other side. I didn't want to go with them, but the rolling nausea and general wooziness made me defenseless. If all else failed, I would let this "Pomfrey" fix me up before I kicked some major ass and busted out of this joint – after finding the Flock and my family, of course.

"Sirius Black," the boy on my other side said, "and Peter Pettigrew's the one over there. We're fourth years, Gryffindors. You?"

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I just shrugged noncommittally. I had learned from years of experience that it was better to give away nothing than to give away the fact that I _knew_ nothing. Unfortunately, this philosophy turned against me, as Sirius and James (who were both surprisingly at least a half-foot taller than yours truly) shared a weighted glance over my head. I raised an eyebrow at them as they helped me around a corner, but they didn't respond.

We wove in and out of hallways, down a swerving staircase that flooded me with a wave of dizziness that almost made me tumble forwards, and, once, through a damp passageway hidden behind a vibrant tapestry.

"Almost there," the boy named Peter called from twenty feet ahead of us. He gestured towards a pair of large wooden doors in front of us that I could tell lead to the mysterious Infirmary. I shrunk away as they loomed over us – though I didn't know exactly where I was, I was bright enough to know that "Infirmary" implied a sterile, white place with gleaming silver instruments and dog cages that were the perfect size for mutant human-bird hybrids like me.

The doors creaked open, and I breathed a sigh of relief: my assumptions were only halfway right. While the enormous room was shrouded in more sanitary white than I liked, it lacked all of the harshness of the hospital rooms at the School. Heavy velvet maroon curtains shadowed half of the shining windows. In place of hospital beds were a row of curtained four-posters, all accompanied by a matching wooden nightstand which were all empty of any terrifying metal scalpels or knives. Bustling around a bed at the end was a thin woman clad in a simple red dress and white apron. She looked to be in her early twenties, barely out of school, and she looked up when we entered the room.

"Messers Black, Potter, and Pettigrew… right on time, as usual. Mr. Lupin should be waking up..." Her eyes landed on me and she halted mid-sentence, frowning. "And who do we have here?"

James shrugged. "We're not exactly sure, Madam Pomfrey. We found her on the fifth floor. Can't remember what house she's in or what year. We think she hit her head or was hexed or something."

_Hexed_. Even through the haze of dizziness, my mind grabbed the word and filed it away for future reference – category: the School. Definition: to be dosed with a seriously funky hallucinogen by a sadist jerk in a white coat. My guard, which had slipped slightly with the trio's niceties and kindness, skyrocketed back into position.

"She seems dizzy, too, like a _Confundus_ charm just wore off," Peter piped up from behind Sirius.

_Confundus charm._ Category: things I should be wary of. Definition: the codename of whatever I had been drugged with. Definitely not something to mess with.

The woman, Madam Pomfrey, sighed with a glance towards the bed she had been previously occupied with. "Let's get you to a bed, deary… come on, right over here…"

She gestured towards an empty bed a little ways down from where I stood, exchanging her arm within mine for James' and Sirius' as they dropped behind.

"I trust you can stay out of trouble for fifteen minutes?" Madam Pomfrey called after them, and a chorus of rowdy assent rose in their wake. She made a "tsk" noise under her breath and helped me into the bed. "Up you go."

The bed, though mostly white, was the comfiest I had ever felt. Impulsively, and almost without my own will, I felt myself relax, the mattress giving way beneath me as I did. For someone who'd spent half her life sleeping in dog crates and caves, it was pretty dang heavenly. Madame Pomfrey hustled away, and my eyes strayed towards the bed at the end of the row, around which James, Sirius, and Peter were now clustered eagerly. All three were talking in hushed voices to the bed's occupant.

Though the majority of the bed's lodger was blocked from my view by the three boys, if I tilted my head at just the right angle, my hawk's vision could make out the face within.

_Jeezum crow._

Growing up in an inhumane testing facility for illegal mutants, you see things – things you might not want to see, things that might make you want to vomit into the nearest trash receptacle or graffiti the nearest shrine to the God that would let this happen. Growing up on the run from gun-slinging lupine-human hybrids, you get beaten up – a lot. Growing up knowing fainting at the sight of blood might be the difference between life and death, you learn to suck it up – no matter what.

But, unlike the apathetic sadists at the School, I'm not an emotionless oaf, and what I saw made even my heart skip a beat. It was bad, even for me. The whitecoats had really done it this time.

His face was crisscrossed with half-healed scratches, the swollen redness of them sticking out against his pale, bruise-mottled skin. A thin scar slashed diagonally across his nose and down his cheek, trailing down into the collar of his white hospital clothes where even more sickly green and purple bruises erupted. Worst of all, beyond the blood and the scars and the scrapes, was the look on his face; he was smiling, laughing, even, completely at ease with the goriness of his situation, as if it happened all the time.

_And what if it does happen all the time?_ a quiet voice – not to be confused with _the_ Voice – inside my head asked. I shook it off, refusing to let myself believe that I was in danger, knowing that it would only make me more frustrated that I was still too vulnerable to attempt escape. If James was right (and if the scarred boy wasn't an indicator), Madam Pomfrey would have me patched up in no time at all. Then and only then would I allow myself to fantasize about crashing through a window and into the openness of the sky.

"Drink this."

A glass bottle, tinted blue and with indiscernible contents, was shoved into my face.

I glared up at Madam Pomfrey, the wielder of said bottle. No freaking way I was touching anything anyone here gave me, especially if I couldn't see what it was. Jeb had taught me that much – before he had turned out to be a backstabbing cretin.

"It's only a mild Healing Potion, mixed with a small dose of a gentle Sleeping Draught."

I didn't take it, a part of me wondering how severely punished I would be if I knocked the bottle right out of her hands. If I could get out of the bed and to the window in the aftermath of the shattering glass…

Someone shouted something from the other side of the Infirmary, and I jerked upward like a puppet on a string. The world closed to a tunnel in front of me, and my head collapsed back down onto the fluffy pillow.

I sighed, infuriated, digging my fingernails into the bedding beneath me.

I wasn't going anywhere.

"Mr. Potter, please try to keep it down," Madam Pomfrey chided, abandoning for a second her campaign to get me to drink from the blue vial. "This is a Hospital Wing, not a zoo."

"Sorry, Madam Pomfrey!" the reprimanded boy called back, not sounding nearly as apologetic as he claimed. The matron rolled her eyes and turned back to me. I forced the best daggers that I could out of my eyes and into her skull.

She exhaled. I was trying her patience. Good for me. Maximum Ride one, whitecoats zip.

"It'll help," Pomfrey told me, "I promise. Now drink."

I tried to count how many times someone had promised me that, and how many times I'd woken up burned and bruised on an operating table, but, unfortunately, I ran out of fingers.

She huffed, crossing her arms as more rowdy shouts sounded from the bed on the end. "Please. I have other patients I need to be tending to."

And without waiting for an answer, she forced the lips of the bottle onto my own and dribbled the disgusting, viscous liquid onto my tongue.

My eyes closed within seconds.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: So…. about deadlines… I kinda suck at them. But thank you for all the people who reviewed, favorite, alerted, and motivated me to update! Seriously, reviews fuel my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! Random note of the chapter: I'm going to marry Kurt Hummel. Cheers! – Casie

I woke up suddenly and without warning, chills running up and down my spine. Though the nausea and dizziness were long gone, the hair on the back of my neck prickled; something was wrong.

Someone was here with me – someone new. Not Madam Pomfrey, or the strange, beaten boy on the end of the row. Someone else.

The darkness evaporated as my hawk-like (Ha! Hawk-like! Me! Get it?) eyes adjusted to the nearly complete blackness. I pressed myself into a sitting position, feeling my muscles tense beneath me. I smiled in spite of myself; I felt strong and powerful and not in the slightest bit disoriented. Halle-freaking-lujah.

Refreshed and overjoyed that I was finally able to kick some major whitecoat ass, I slid silently off the bed. An image flew to the front of my brain; the Infirmary, in daylight, the windows and doors and possible escape routes seeming to glow in the 3D Imax of my mind. The closest one to me was the set of gargantuan wooden doors I had originally entered through, the crack between the pair shrouded in a shadow –

The feeling that something was wrong pulled at my stomach like a bad pork chop. I frowned, creeping forward, and scanned through it again, trying to place the feeling of unease. Everything seemed in order. Nearly all of the four-poster hospital beds were open, their curtains tied neatly back exactly as they had been when I entered; the only exception was the bed on the end, and, if I strained my ears, I could hear the wounded boy inside breathing evenly, asleep. A tiny sliver of light beamed from the crack of the wooden doors, trickling out onto the floor from the top down until it hit that mysterious shadow –

_The shadow_. It was dark, taller than me, and as thick as the drapes… but it had no source. No oddly-shaped lighting fixtures, or wardrobes, or anything stood close to it; in fact, it seemed to spring up from the ground itself.

And then it hit me, with all the subtlety of a guillotine:

It wasn't a shadow. It was a person.

In less than a second, I had catapulted myself away from the bed, my hands reflexively curling into fists as I launched myself at the silhouette. My arm whipped out and snatched the newcomer by the collar before he even had time to blink. What can I say? I'm not exactly the under-dramatic type.

"_Where am I?_" I snarled, my eyes straining to see the face in the darkness.

"Max?" the shadow whispered.

My stomach dropped. My heart leapt. My legs turned to jelly. My fingers let go of the choke-hold I had without a conscious effort to do so. I knew that voice, jeezum crow, I knew that voice.

"Fang?" I croaked out.

The slightest of movements, the most imperceptible of nods and the smallest glimmer of white teeth flashed in the briefest of smiles.

Okay, now, by this point, you all should know that I'm not a touchy-feely PDA kinda girl. You want action? Blood, guts, a fight that puts Hollywood's best stunt doubles to shame? You know who to call. But all that lovey-dovey affection Hallmark crap? Uh-uh. Not this bird kid.

But if you drug someone, kidnap them, knock 'em unconscious, and dope 'em up with a whole lotta crap… well, even _I_ might get a little bit mushy.

Which is why I proceeded to throw my arms around the Rock of Emotional Detachment himself and squeeze out whatever life was left in him.

"Miss me?" he said, and from my comfortable, COMPLETELY PLATONIC niche in his chest, I could practically _feel_ the annoying smirk settling onto his face. I pulled myself away from him and tried to get a fix on his eyes, which were still hidden by the darkness. Their normal pitch-black coloring didn't help, either, and I couldn't help but feel that my glare of fury missed his retinas completely. I settled for shooting back a scathing yet brilliantly witty retort.

"You're the one who came to find me," I reminded him, the words bringing my thoughts back to the situation at hand with a jolt. "And… where is it, exactly, that you found me?"

Fang's silhouette shrugged noncommittally. "I don't know. Some castle or something. At first I thought we were back at that Itex in Germany, the one we trashed, that maybe they had rebuilt it or something, but…"

His voice trailed off, and even without seeing his face, I could sense his hesitancy.

"But…?" I prompted him. I heard him take a deep breath, as if he was steeling himself for some sort of harsh blow.

"But I don't know if I can trust what I see, because I'm hallucinating."

I exhaled the breath he had just drawn in… because insanity is always better in pairs, right?

"I think… I think I'm hallucinating, too. There were these paintings, where I arrived, just a little ways from here, and… they were moving. Talking, too. And the staircases… they moved. Not like escalators. They really, truly _moved_. And then there were these boys, talking about _charms_ and _hexes_ and this woman, talking about _potions_. Whatever they're doing here, it's serious – they have codenames for everything," I told Fang, wishing, praying that his hallucinations were the same as mine and that there was even the tiniest speck of hope for our situation.

"I saw the paintings, too," Fang confirmed in a low voice, as if to remind me that we were probably being watched, wherever we were. "And the staircases. And transparent people, like ghosts. And it wasn't like I was tripping, not the usual low-grade psychokiller crap the scientists fed us at the school. These were the most realistic things I've seen."

I nodded, finishing the thoughts I knew were swirling around his brain out loud: "So they finally know what they're doing. Which means we have even less time to bust out of here before we get slice'n'diced."

"Yup," Fang replied, summing up our doom as usual in one grim, monosyllabic utterance.

A thought hit me then, as my eyes darted around the room and towards the door in hopes of finding some method of escape. "Where's the rest of the Flock? They're not with you?"

Fang cocked his head at me, the crack of light from the doors rippling above his tousled black hair as he did so. "I thought I'd find them with you. I woke up alone, in some sort of passageway, about an hour ago. I've been wandering everywhere – this place is massive – but you're the first person I've found."

The light, hopeful feeling that had settled somewhere in the region of my stomach upon the arrival of Fang vanished at once – or, more accurately, condensed into a big lead brick that left me feeling anxious and sick again. I tried to shake it off as I plastered a confident, determined look on my face that I knew Fang would see right through.

"Well, that just means we have to look harder. Starting with outside of this room," I informed him, not pausing to give the creepy infirmary a second glance as I pushed confidently past him and the wooden doors and into the corridor beyond.

Unlike the Hospital Wing, whose only windows had been swathed in velvet curtains the thickness of my arm, this hallway was flooded with moonlight. The light streamed in from a tall, wide, enormous, _fragile_ glass window on the opposite end of the corridor. Brilliant. Once we had an escape plan, it was only a matter of time before we found the rest of the Flock and sailed away on a cool breeze.

Once again acting as if he could read my thoughts, Fang's powerful legs started moving towards the window at the exact same moment as my own – and I mean, really, whose legs _wouldn't_ do that? All that glittering glass was like an open invitation to crash through into the crisp night air. _Smash me, Max!_ the window seemed to cry. _Escape! Smash me!_

And, seriously, who could refuse a plea like that?

"Max?"

My feet skidded to a halt a half-second before my shoulder was to shatter the window into a million bits.

"Fang?"

A second pair of feet lurched to a far more graceful stop beside my own. I whirled on the spot, my fingers tightening into fists for the second time in as many minutes. This time, though, the relief was much more sudden; moonlight splashed onto a pair of faces on a stairwell to my right, and I exhaled.

"Nudge! Iggy!" I hissed, not daring to raise my voice any louder than a half-whisper of exclamatory glee. I stumbled backwards as a mass of brown skin and hair and feathers attacked me in a bear hug to rival my own.

"Max! Oh my gosh, I was so worried! I thought maybe they got you – well, I mean, obviously, they did, they got us, too, but you're _here!_ And you're safe, I think, you're not dead or anything, right? They didn't cut you up? I don't think they did anything to us, we couldn't see any whitecoats anywhere when we woke up, but then again we were unconscious so I don't really know and –"

I squished Nudge back, seeing a smile spread across Iggy's face despite the suckiness of our current situation. I reached out to tap his arm in an awkward-yet-soothing manner as soon as Nudge had released me… but something stopped me. I did a mental count, and a mental re-count, my eyes scanning the stairwell repeatedly to no avail. "Are you… is there anyone else with you?"

Nudge shook her head, her face falling and her wide eyes drooping in a way that revealed more to me than any margin of her ramblings could: she was hoping Angel and Gazzy would be with us just as much as I was hoping they would be with her.

With his uncanny ability to sense the things he shouldn't be able to see, Iggy stepped further into the moonlight and piped up, "I don't think they're here. I think they got away. They were ahead of us. They got up into the air in time. Whatever they shot us with – bullets, tranqs, whatever – there were only four shots."

My lips twitched upwards. They were safe, thank whatever gods may be. No matter what the sadistic a-holes at the School put me through, I knew I could stand it, as long as I knew someone out there was free. If Angel and Gazzy weren't here, that was the best that I could wish for.

"Right," I said, trying to compose the emotional puddle of goo I had turned into in the past few moments into something more assuring. "Now to get out of this madhouse."

Grinning one last time at my semi-reunited Flock, I turned to the window and steeled myself for the blow. My muscles tensed, I closed my eyes, and –

"I don't think I'd try that, if I were you."

I opened my eyes but didn't bother to unclench my teeth as I whipped around for what felt like the hundredth time that night. Our new guest was on the other end of the hallway from our impromptu family reunion, but with the combination of the light from the almost-full moon and my superior mutant vision, I could make out his features perfectly. He was tall and gangly and wearing a bathrobe that was identical to the ones the three boys had sported hours earlier, except that his was a brilliant purple. His hair was long and a fading auburn, his trailing beard streaked with lines of a silvery grey. He didn't look particularly dangerous, but, then again, the mad ones never did.

"Why not?" I barked out suspiciously, my eyes narrowing as they traced his visage, running him past my memories of any past or present School, Itex, or Institute staff members. No hits. Whoever he was, this guy was new.

"Those windows aren't just guarded by glass, you know," he replied cryptically, in an infuriatingly cheerful tone. His eyes sparkled behind half-moon glasses, as if he hadn't just stumbled upon his captives trying to escape his corrupted, convoluted prison.

Well, wasn't that just fan-friggin'-tastic. It wasn't like the bad guys could ever, you know, throw something at us in black and white. Maybe, "you'll get shot down like a duck in open season!" or, "we have Rottweilers that could rip apart an army of barbarians!" or even, "we have bombs!" But, nooooooo, that would just be too easy, now wouldn't it!

And so, because my name is Max-the-Brave-and-Incredibly-Stupid, I proceeded to ignore the bearded man, turn on my heel and smash my fist into the window…

Or, at least, that was what I intended to do.

My fingers never met glass. Instead, they seemed to get stuck in some thick, viscous liquid that was somewhere between creamy peanut butter and Jell-O in consistency. They halted about a millimeter from the window and refused to budge, no matter how much of my weight and sheer muscle I forced on them.

I yanked my hand free of the substance and wiped it on my pants, but there was nothing to wipe off; it was as if my fingers had slid through air.

My eyes flickered to the wary faces of my Flock and back to the old man. "What are you doing? Why are we here? What's going on?"

"Ah, the questions. I thought you'd be the inquisitive sort." The old codger smiled at the scowl that was steadily rising upon my face, as if he took some sort of twisted delight in my fury and helplessness. "Perhaps we can be of some assistance to each other – for, I must confess, I, too, have far more queries than answers. However, it is a rather late hour, and I don't think these drafty corridors are quite the setting for the conversation we are about to have. Would you mind following me to my office?"

In a moment that, had we not been in such a potentially fatal situation, would have had me brimming with pride, my half-Flock didn't move a single inch. Fang was stone beside me, his tendons standing out like the steel framework of a bridge in my peripheral vision; both Iggy and Nudge had sunk into fighting stances on my other side, their faces set into fierce expressions of determination. We weren't going anywhere without a fight.

"Who are you? What did you do to us? We know you dosed us. We can fight you, you know. And we _will_ win."

It was a lie, and everyone around me knew it, including the old man. We were trapped in a terrain that wasn't our own, and though we outnumbered and undoubtedly overpowered the one, frail man, there were probably dozens of gun-toting thugs ready to come bursting into the corridor. But bluffing was the only hope we had of escape at this point, so I forced all the strength I had into making it look like I wasn't terrified.

The old man's smile didn't falter once. "I? I am Professor Albus Dumbledore."


End file.
